The Black Kids(55)

“Okay!”

“Don’t ask Daddy that.”

“Why not?”

“You see how sad he is, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’ll make it worse.”

“But why can’t you tell me?”

“Just… Just let Daddy tell you when he’s ready.”

But I guess he’s never been ready, and I’ve never worked up the balls to ask. Whatever it is, I know it isn’t something like cancer or a heart attack, because people talk about people who die of those things. He and Uncle Ronnie don’t talk about her much at all.

After a few too many beers one night, Uncle Ronnie told me that their mother used to close the shop and take them out of school and buy them ice cream and drive them up into the hills or along the coast for hours, talking to them about their friends at school or civil rights or their father who died in the war. Other times, he said she would lock herself in her bedroom for several days straight, and even if they pounded on the door and screamed “I’m hungry!” she wouldn’t come out. They almost lost the store multiple times.

I imagine it would be hard to grow up with a mother like that—a mother who loved you hard and then retreated, like the flow and crash and ebb of a wave, so you never quite knew whether you were floating or drowning. My mother said that to cope with his mother, my father hid in himself; then for a while he hid at Darla’s, until finally my mother met him and yelled at him to come out. But how do you take a turtle and tell it overnight to be a dolphin?

This is exactly what she screamed at my dad during one of their fights.

“You’re being a turtle, but I need you to be a dolphin, Craig.”

My father and I sit across the couch from each other, and I try to make sense of the man in front of me.

“You never tell me anything about before we were born,” I say.

“Did I ever tell you that my mother used to take us fishing?” my dad says.

“No.”

He tells me how his mother used to pile them into the truck when they should’ve been in school and drive them up or down the coast. There the three of them would sit, fishing lines in a row, until something bit and the others would whoop and holler, cheerleading as he or she reeled it in. Grandma Shirley had grown up in the South, with brothers, and had grown up fishing with her brothers until she moved far away, had my dad and Ronnie, and eventually picked up where she’d left off. They’d bring home the day’s catch in a cooler, fish guts and scales stinking up the tiny kitchen with its homemade curtains, Grandma Shirley humming as she brined.

“I stopped wanting to go,” he says.

“Why?”

“Wanted to be in school. I liked school.”

Grandma Shirley taught both boys everything there was to know about vacuums. Ronnie took to it, but I guess my dad wanted more school, something different, somewhere away. Anyway, Grandma Shirley used that vacuum money to send my father to a fancy college and then to grad school, while Uncle Ronnie stayed home and worked on fixing what was broken.

Sometimes I think we gave my father a good excuse to run farther away from his bad memories. Maybe this is where Jo gets it from. Turtles have shells, which are these very complicated structures meant to protect them from the world around them, but shells also hide your heart. Shells can blind you to beauty, even when you’re right in the middle of it.

“How did Grandma Shirley die?” I ask quietly.

My father pretends like he didn’t hear me and turns up the volume. The distance between us is exactly one shell.



* * *




In the end, it’s not fire that gets to Grandma Shirley’s store but the looters.

This is what they take:

Broken Hoovers, Bissells, Sanitaires, and Mieles

Newly refurbished Hoovers, Bissells, Sanitaires, and Mieles

Ronnie’s prized, brand-new, fancy Dyson that won the International Design Fair last year, bought special from the catalog

The cash register and the entire safe

The brand-new Apple computer Morgan used to do her homework after school

The toilet paper and paper towels from the small restroom?!



En masse, the looters push into the dream that my grandma built with her calloused brown hands in a city of angels. They pull these things out through the door and the broken window, stepping over all the broken glass.

This is what they leave:

The curtains that she sewed by hand in the waiting room

The baby pictures of me and Jo and Morgan and Tanya that Grandma Shirley nailed, hands shaking, into the wall, and Uncle Ronnie kept

The pictures of all the youth sports teams she’d sponsored over the years, the boys and girls in them long grown—at least one of whom tried to scream above the looters to “Stop! Stop this now!”



My father’s life was built in part on vacuums, but I’ve rarely seen my parents use one.

A few years ago, while Lucia was cleaning up, our old vacuum let out a loud, unsettling roar and then a series of death gasps. My mother argued that it was time to finally get a new one.

“No, not yet,” my dad said.

What I remember most is the way my father bent over the vacuum for hours like he was doing open-heart surgery, or scaling a fish. Looking very much at home.